What makes a great singer — technique, intonation, decibels? Artists such as Billie Holiday, Bob Dylan and Neil Young have voices that are an acquired taste, yet each communicates the meaning of a song so powerfully, so truthfully, that considerations of tone, of “quality”, cease to matter. Dusty Springfield and Marvin Gaye, on the other hand, are exemplars of another key factor: restraint, or knowing when to shut up as well as when to emote.

Today, Amy Winehouse is following in the Holiday tradition. Her fellow artist Joss Stone is ignoring Springfield’s less-is-more legacy. But there is a young singer who strikes many as having absorbed what Stone has so signally failed to comprehend. Candie Payne’s debut album show-cases a sparkling new talent, but it does so hesitantly, economically.

“Just because a song is sung with a big voice,” says the 24-year-old Liverpudlian, “that doesn’t necessarily mean it has more soul. There are so many singers who seem to feel it’s more about showing what they’re capable of than expressing the meaning of a song. But a singer’s job is to interpret a story so that people feel it. Sometimes the spaces say more than the words.”

There are vocal spaces aplenty on I Wish I Could Have Loved You More, the album Payne wrote and recorded with the producer Simon Dine. Some are boxing it up as a strictly retro affair, a dismissal made easier by Payne’s 1960s hairdo, not to mention the undoubted stylistic echoes of 1960s pop and soul the album contains. “One interview actually said, ‘Do you live in a 1960s bubble? Have you got a mobile phone? Do you use the inter-net?’ ” Payne recalls in exasperation. “Okay, it contains references to certain eras, but I think it’s very much a record of now.”

Payne is ready for the Dusty comparisons, too. “I hadn’t listened to her till halfway through making the album. Somebody who remarked that my voice was similar in some ways said I should listen to Dusty in Memphis, so I did. I don’t think my voice, tonally, is anything like hers. She sings straight notes, and she jumps from a low note to a high one without all the frilly bits, and that’s maybe something I do as well. But she has a woman’s voice, a voice from a woman’s experience. I think I sound like a 12-year-old. The things I’m singing about are from new, first experience.”

All I Need to Hear, the song that first alerted people to Payne last year, is a case in point. An intensely brittle first-person narrative about a woman clinging to her increasingly cold lover, it is typical of an album that abounds with dashed romantic dreams and guilty feelings of longing for escape. Payne’s skill as a lyricist is to hint at that, rather than wail into listeners’ ears. “Yes, it’s quite a lonely record,” she agrees. “But I was disappointed [in love]. I’m just not a lay-it-all-on-the-table person. I’d rather it be a glimpse through a half-open door than the door be wide open, and you’re trying to shut it again.”

Payne may partly resist the Springfield parallels, but it’s that sense of intruding, on the part of the listener, that most recalls the work of her British-soul forebear. Originally, becoming a singer was the last thing on her mind. Her siblings had, she felt, got the musician angle covered: her brother Sean is the drummer with the Zutons; and Howie Payne founded the cult jangle-pop group the Stands. “I’d never considered it,” their sister says. “It was their thing. I wanted to do something different.”

So, Payne pursued her love of art and fashion, and was set on a career in one of the two. It was only when she took a job in the Liverpool vintage-clothing boutique Resurrection, and got to know the shop’s constant stream of sartorially obsessed musicheads and their record collections, that she began to catch the bug. A stage debut with a local band, Tramp Attack, during which she performed Dolly Parton’s Jolene, was the moment of revelation. “The feeling was incredible,” she says, laughing at the cheesiness of it all. “I lost myself, and found myself, too.”

If there’s another very modern aspect to both the singer and her album, it’s the combination of artistic and lyrical fragility with no-messing professional determination. You note the put-up-or-shut-up vocals on Take Me; then you remember the tiny, intimate singing voice on All I Need to Hear and Seasons Change, and the person who says: “I can be very unsure of myself.” And you think, which of them is the true version? The answer is: both, actually. And who wants straightforward when contradictions sound this good?

The single I Wish I Could Have Loved You More is released on May 7 on Deltasonic

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